Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated his latest offer to help Armenia and Azerbaijan negotiate a peace treaty and delineate their border in a phone call with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Friday.
Putin offered to help broker such an accord during a state visit to Baku on Monday. Meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, he said he will talk to Pashinyan about “the results of our negotiations.”
In its readout of Putin’s call with Pashinyan, the Kremlin said the two men discussed the normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations in the context of the Russian leader’s talks with Aliyev.
It said Putin reaffirmed “the readiness of the Russian side to continue to assist Armenia and Azerbaijan in negotiating a peace treaty, advancing the process of border delimitation and demarcation as well as in unblocking transport and logistics links.”
Read also
In a short statement, the Armenian government’s press office said Pashinyan thanked Putin for sharing “the impressions of his visit to Azerbaijan.” It did not give further details of that discussion.
The statement also said the two leaders agreed to meet soon to “discuss issues of the Armenia-Russia bilateral agenda.”
Russia has repeatedly offered to resume its mediation of Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks over the past year, including in the aftermath of last month’s meeting of the foreign ministers of the two South Caucasus states hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Unlike Azerbaijan, Armenia has essentially rejected these initiatives amid rising tensions in Russian-Armenian relations and its ongoing drift to the West.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sparked a fresh war of words between Moscow and Yerevan during Putin’s trip to Azerbaijan. Speaking to Russian state television, he accused Pashinyan’s government of torpedoing a Russian-brokered agreement to give Azerbaijan a transport corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
The Armenian Foreign Ministry rejected the accusation and said Lavrov is calling into question Russia’s “constructive involvement” in Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks. The Russian Foreign Ministry hit back at Yerevan on Wednesday.